It explains all your difficulties at once, and I regret that I do not seem to have mentioned it at any of those mid-day symposia which were so pleasant when you and I were younger.
Ever yours very faithfully,
T.H. Huxley.
P.S.—Apropos of Athelstan Riley and his friends—I fool rather obliged to them. I assented to the compromise (1) because I felt that English opinion would not let us have the education of the masses at any cheaper price; (2) because, with the Bible in lay hands, I was satisfied that the teaching from it would gradually become modified into harmony with common sense.
I do not doubt that this is exactly what has happened, and is the ground of the alarm of the orthodox.
But I do not repent of the compromise in the least. Twenty years of reasonably good primary education is "worth a mass."
Moreover the Diggleites stand to lose anyhow, and they will lose most completely and finally if they win at the elections this month. So I am rather inclined to hope they may.
Hodeslea, Staveley Road, Eastbourne, November 3, 1894.
My dear Mr. Clodd,
They say that the first thing an Englishman does when he is hard up for money is to abstain from buying books. The first thing I do when I am liver-y, lumbagy, and generally short of energy, is to abstain from answering letters. And I am only just emerging from a good many weeks of that sort of flabbiness and poverty.